from the Walter-Cronkite-is-Dead dept

We've been talking a lot lately about how the new school of website design (with ReCode, Bloomberg, and Vox at the vanguard) has involved a misguided war on the traditional comment section. Websites are gleefully eliminating the primary engagement mechanism with their community and then adding insult to injury by pretending it's because they really, really love "conversation." Of course the truth is many sites just don't want to pay moderators, don't think their community offers any valuable insight, or don't like how it "looks" when thirty people simultaneously tell their writers they've got story facts completely and painfully wrong.

Many sites justify the move by claiming comments sections are just so packed with pile that they're beyond redemption, though studies show it doesn't actually take much work to raise the discourse bar and reclaim your comment section from the troll jungle if you just give half a damn (as in, just simple community engagement can change comment tone dramatically). Case in point is Salon, which decided to repair its awful comment section by hiring a full time moderator, rewarding good community involvement, and treating commenters like actual human beings:

"You can measure engagement by raw number of comments or commenters. Using Google Analytics, Livefyre and Adobe, Salon looks at metrics like the number of replies they make as a share of overall comments, how frequently they share Salon articles, and how many pageviews they log per visit. (Users who log in, which is required if you want to comment, view seven pages per session on average, while non-registered users make it to only 1.7, according to Dooling.) After it identified these top commenters, Salon has solicited their feedback and invited them to lead discussions on posts and even help moderate threads.

..."Comments aren’t awful,” (said Salon community advisor Annemarie Dooling). “It’s just the way we position them. The whole idea is not to give up on debate."

That news is now a conversation and a community is something traditional news outlets have struggled to understand, so it's ironic that a major wave of websites proclaiming to be the next great iteration of media can't seem to figure this out either. For example Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky, spearheading the freshly-redesigned Bloomberg, recently argued that disabling comments is ok because editors are still "listening" to reader feedback by watching analytics and the viewer response to wacky font changes. But that's not the same as engagement or facilitating engagement. Similarly, Reuters and ReCode editors have tried to argue that Facebook and Twitter are good enough substitutes for comments -- ignoring that outsourcing engagement to Facebook dulls and homogenizes your brand.

"I feel very strongly that digital journalism needs to be a conversation with readers. This is one, if not the most important area of emphasis that traditional newsrooms are actually ignoring. You see site after site killing comments and moving away from community – that’s a monumental mistake. Any site that moves away from comments is a plus for sites like ours. Readers need and deserve a voice. They should be a core part of your journalism."

Now -- can you quantify and prove that money spent on community engagement will come back to you in clear equal measure as cold, hard cash? Of course not. But all the same, it's not really a choice. We're well beyond the Walter Cronkite era of journalism where a talking head speaks at the audience from a bully pulpit. We're supposed to have realized by now that news really is a malleable, fluid, conversational organism. Under this new paradigm, reporters talk to (and correct) other reporters, blogs and websites talk to (and correct) other blogs and websites, and readers talk to (and correct) the writers and news outlets. You're swimming against the current if your website design culminates in little more than a stylish uni-directional bullhorn.

from the I-can't-hear-you dept

We've been noting how the trend du jour among news outlets has been to not only kill off your community comments section, but to proudly proclaim you're doing so because you really value conversation. It's of course understandable that many writers and editors don't feel motivated to wade into the often heated comment section to interact with their audience. It's also understandable if a company doesn't want to spend the money to pay someone to moderate comments. But if you do decide to reduce your community's ability to engage, do us all a favor and don't pretend it's because you really adore talking to your audience.

The latest war on comments comes courtesy of the folks over at Bloomberg. You may have noticed that the Bloomberg media empire recently went through a bit of a consolidation and redesign under the leadership of former Verge editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky. Buried among the vertigo-inducing fonts and amusing new 404 warning, is, you'll note, a very obvious lack of user comments. This is, to hear Topolsky tell it, because comments don't actually reflect your community:

"I've looked at the analytics on the commenting community versus overall audience. You’re really talking about less than one percent of the overall audience that’s engaged in commenting, even if it looks like a very active community,” he says. “In the grand scheme of the audience, it doesn't represent the readership."

In other words, because most users can't be bothered to comment, we're going to eliminate a major artery for input for those users who do choose to closely participate with the authors and website. No worry, says Topolsky -- just because Bloomberg no longer gives a damn what you say to its authors regarding individual pieces, that doesn't mean the website isn't listening to its userbase when it comes to quirky color and font schemes:

"Nothing about the new Bloomberg is set in stone; Topolsky says the entire process is iterative, and that includes the comments. The digital team will be monitoring reader behavior across desktop and mobile to see how they’re reacting to and interacting with the new site. For example, on launch day, they experimented with header height so see what readers like better. On mobile, where they’re working to “find the right balance between design and imagery and text,” Topolsky plans to experiment with different formats — more text versus more color versus a grid — to figure out what draws readers in."

While at least Topolsky seems open to the idea of comments returning, he still misses the point: watching analytics to judge responses to design changes isn't the same as actually allowing a conversation with your audience. If you actually do value your readership, you wouldn't be outsourcing their conversations to the feral and intellectually-stunted Facebook mind pool. As some Techdirt regulars have noticed, local comments encourage local community, and despite all the hand-wringing about trolls out of control, studies have recently shown it only takes treating commenters like real people (and a little moderating) to dramatically raise the discourse bar. This is your audience and your community, not a raging cacophony of encroaching cybernetic hyenas in need of a good napalming.

I still think the lowly comment section is getting a bad rap during this latest site redesign phase (led by folks like ReCode and Vox), and it's leading to a continued droll homogenization of not only website design, but of participatory news conversation itself.

from the gags-help-communication dept

There's a trend afoot among some website editors to kill the comment section, then proclaim that they've courageously decided to reduce conversation to help improve conversation. It's a random bit of logic we've noted doesn't make any sense if you're interested in actually fostering a local community, and care about not having all conversation outsourced to Facebook. The pretense that you're killing comments because you're nobly trying to further human communications (and not, say, because your website is cheap and lazy) is also disingenuous. That hasn't stopped ReCode, Reuters, Popular Science, or some newspapers from killing comments in order to push humans to the next evolutionary level (or whatever).

This week, yet another website joined the "comments are evil and have no use" parade. In a now familiar treatise, TheWeek.com announced that while editors "truly do value your opinions," you're no longer going to be allowed to express them on their website. According to TheWeek, this nuclear option was required because comments are just filled with horrible, nasty people:

"There was a time — not so long ago! — when the comments sections of news and opinion sites were not only the best place to host these conversations, they were the only place. That is no longer the case. Too often, the comments sections of news sites are hijacked by a small group of pseudonymous commenters who replace smart, thoughtful dialogue with vitriolic personal insults and rote exchanges of partisan acrimony. This small but outspoken group does a disservice to the many intelligent, open-minded people who seek a fair and respectful exchange of ideas in the comments sections of news sites."

Of course if news outlets spent a few minutes actually moderating the comments section and treating it like a valuable community resource (instead of oh, a drunk uncle with a bad goiter and nasty halitosis at your wedding), that probably wouldn't be as big of a problem.

"One surprisingly easy thing they found that brought civil, relevant comments: the presence of a recognized reporter wading into the comments.

Seventy different political posts were randomly either left to their own wild devices, engaged by an unidentified staffer from the station, or engaged by a prominent political reporter. When the reporter showed up, “incivility decreased by 17 percent and people were 15 percent more likely to use evidence in their comments on the subject matter,” according to the study."

Note by "recognized" the paper just means somebody relatively recognized from the outlet or the reporter themselves. They also tried their very best to actually define "incivility" as a quantifiable metric:

"To develop a list of characteristics that signaled incivility, we drew from past research on the characteristics of uncivil discourse (Papacharissi, 2004; Sobieraj & Berry, 2011). To be coded as uncivil, the comment needed to include one or more of the following attributes: (1) Obscene language / vulgarity (e.g. “A@$#***les”), (2) Insulting language / name calling (e.g. “you idiots”), (3) Ideologically extreme language (e.g. “Liberal potheads”), (4) Stereotyping (e.g. “Deport them illegals”), or (5) An exaggerated argument (e.g. "It’s very easy to solve all of this just keep your legs closed if you don’t want a baby.”). Comments containing any one of these characteristics were coded as uncivil."

Having been a blogger (and a moderator of one of the Internet's larger tech forums) for more than fifteen years, I can anecdotally note that even the biggest jackasses generally do dial back the antisocial angst when you calmly and politely talk to them (whether I've always been able to do that every day without piling on antisocial angst of my own is another discussion). But between actual involvement and reasonable moderation, it's not hard to reclaim a comment section from the encroaching, troll-induced apocalyptic jungle. What websites that close comment sections are doing is telling everyone they don't give quite enough of a shit to work to improve them. Proceeding to proclaim this is just because you really love conversation informs that same community you also think they're kind of stupid.

from the doesn't-matter dept

Back in October, we pointed out the pointlessness of focusing on who sent more comments to the FCC over net neutrality, as there appeared to be a whole lot of astroturfing and misleading tactics being used to ratchet up the counts. That didn't mean that the commenting and looking at the information wasn't useful -- it is -- but there was little value in a purely "numbers" based focus on how many comments were filed from those "for" or "against." With so many coming from various online forms, the weight they would have on the final FCC decision is about as close to nil as possible.

However... an interesting sort of fight has broken out about all of this. The Sunlight Foundation released an analysis this week of the second round of FCC comments on net neutrality (technically these are supposed to be "in response" to the first round, but they were basically just another chance to say the same things all over again. The Sunlight Foundation noted that this time, an anti-net neutrality group (the same one we discussed as our example of totally misleading crap being pushed in the FCC's direction) apparently convinced many hundreds of thousands of people to send in one of its incredibly misleading comments, all of which will be promptly ignored. The Sunlight Foundation's analysis claimed that the majority of the comments in round two came from this group, American Commitment, which completely incorrectly told people that net neutrality was about a "left-wing extremist..." "takeover of the internet." Which, frankly, is bullshit. You can disagree with net neutrality without lying, but American Commitment didn't seem to be able to do that. Still, its lies certainly did convince lots of people to click "send" on its outrage-o-matic machine.

American Commitment then took the Sunlight Foundation's announcement and literally declared itself the winner of who filed the most comments. Except... not only were there clear limitations in the data, which the Sunlight Foundation got from the FCC's public release, many on the pro-net neutrality side started pointing out that the numbers are clearly incorrect. They know how many letters were sent from their side -- and the numbers from the FCC's release (which Sunlight used) appeared to vastly undercount the actual filings.

Fight for the Future then dug into the data itself and argued that the FCC and Sunlight Foundation screwed up in counting the comments, "dropping at least 244,881 pro-net neutrality comments." The Sunlight Foundation shot back that it thinks Fight for the Future made its own mistakes in the data analysis.

Finally, I've spoken to multiple people inside the FCC who are now admitting that something clearly went wrong with the data that it released -- so it's going back and doing a recount itself. We should know more on the results soon, but it sounds like there's a good chance that the original data that Sunlight relied on may have had some problems.

There are two big takeaways from this, neither of which are really related to all the sniping going on:

The exact count still doesn't fucking matter. This isn't a popularity contest. It's about doing what's right for the future of the internet and the American public who uses it.

The FCC's technology needs a massive upgrade. The technology that the FCC uses to bring in these comments is decades old and is simply not designed (at all) for this level of public participation. And the problem there is Congress, which refuses to allocate any budget at all to the FCC to improve its own computer systems. This was part of the reason why the whole system went down during the first comment period. And no matter what you think of the FCC, at the very least we should be able to agree that better transparency and openness is important, and to do that, the FCC should have computer systems that were at least built in the modern era.

Other than that, this whole numbers game of who hit the outrage-o-matic button harder seems like a distraction from the main point: the future of the internet.

from the addition-through-subtraction dept

As we've been noting, there's a growing trend afoot whereby some news websites have started unilaterally declaring the lowly news comment section dead, and therefore have started eliminating the ability for visitors to comment entirely. While it's one thing to just close site comments and be done with it, sites like ReCode, Reuters and Popular Science have been quick to insist that they're killing comments for the good of the "conversation," which sounds so much better than "we closed news comments because we're too cheap and lazy to police bile and spam."

At a time when racial conversation couldn't be more important, the St. Louis Post Dispatch has decided to join the war on comments, this week declaring that the paper would be eliminating comments from paper editorials completely. This is, the paper declares, because it's very much concerned about having a "meaningful discussion":

"We intend to use our opinion pages to help the St. Louis region have a meaningful discussion about race. So we are going to turn off the comments in the editorial section for a while, and see what we learn from it. (Comment will continue on news articles). Comments might return to the opinion pages. Or we might find that without them, the discussion — through letters, social media conversations and online chats, rises to a higher level."

Again, does anything say "we love conversation" quite like restricting conversation? Like ReCode and Reuters, the paper appears to believe that e-mail and social media are good enough substitutes for an open conversation on site -- not understanding that part of building a community involves a cultivating a regular, engaged local readership, and protecting that readership from the angsty dregs of the Internet.

The paper justifies its move by leaning heavily on a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study (also see this NY Times report) that found news story readers could have their opinions manipulated through completely unmoderated comments (something astroturfing and marketing firms have relied on for ages):

"In their study, published last year, researchers concluded that “Much in the same way that watching uncivil politicians argue on television causes polarization among individuals, impolite and incensed blog comments can polarize online users.” In some cases, negative blog comments actually changed readers’ perception of what they read, not just their opinions about it."

But isn't shifting opinions part of having any conversation, online or off? And is killing the comment section entirely really the way to handle aggressive, trolling, or misleading comments? It still feels like many outlets have just grown tired of managing their own communities, but instead of admitting that they're not invested enough to spend time weeding the troll garden, they've taken to disingenuously claiming they're somehow revolutionizing online conversation -- by making sure there's less of it.

from the baby-and-the-bathwater dept

A little more than a year ago, Popular Science announced they were shutting of news story comments, stating that comments were "bad for science." Earlier this month Reuters Digital Executive Editor Dan Colarusso also announced that the company would also be eliminating comments from news stories. Comments, Colarusso proclaimed, were no longer necessary thanks to the rise of social media. Reuters still values conversation about the news, he insisted, but the old-fashioned idea of allowing users to directly comment on stories must give way to "new realities of behavior in the marketplace":

"Much of the well-informed and articulate discussion around news, as well as criticism or praise for stories, has moved to social media and online forums. Those communities offer vibrant conversation and, importantly, are self-policed by participants to keep on the fringes those who would abuse the privilege of commenting."

That's a lovely way of saying that Reuters didn't care enough about its readers to pay for moderators. This is the same Reuters that a few years ago threw the baby out with the bathwater when they banned anonymous commenters, ignoring the fact that anonymity isn't synonymous with jackassery, and can often allow people to give valuable insight they might not be comfortable with otherwise.

On the heels of the Reuters announcement the folks over at Re/code this week announced a similar plan, again insisting that social media is a good enough replacement for direct, on-site reader feedback:

"Our writers are all active on services like Twitter and Facebook, and our official Re/code accounts on social media post our stories all day long. Readers aren’t shy about offering their opinions to us on these and other social media services, and you are likelier to be able to interact with us there. In effect, we believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years."

Should you visit Re/code now, you're informed that your comments are considered so important, you're encouraged to leave:

This sudden disdain for traditional comments raises the question: is Facebook somehow immune to stupid comments? Is forcing all news conversation on to Facebook's terms really an improvement in meaningful dialogue? The rush to declare the comment section dead seems to ignore the fact that on-site comments create value by building a sense of local community, something GigaOM's Mathew Ingram recently put rather succinctly:

"The bottom line is that if the discussion and debate and interaction around a news story occurs somewhere else, then soon the readers who are interested in that engagement will start to think of the platform where it occurs as the important part of the relationship — not the site that actually created the content."

Offloading moderation costs to social media websites is of course their prerogative, but I find the pretense that this is about some kind of concern for an evolution in conversation to be disingenuous. It's like a local bar owner saying they value intelligent conversation so much they'd really prefer it if patrons held their conversation at the massive stadium down the street. It's a way to keep your readers -- both the obnoxious ones and those offering interesting insight and corrections -- at arms length. The fact these announcements tend to be dripping with disdain for site readership doesn't generate the impression that participatory feedback is actually welcome.

That's not to say comments aren't frequently a raging cacophony of nitwits, partisan blowhards and spambots when moderated poorly. However, there's a number of older tech communities like Slashdot that have been able to moderate communities and cultivate intelligent conversation for more than a decade on a fraction of the budget of Re/Code and Reuters. Sites like Reddit and Gawker have similarly tinkered with community self-regulation and systems that work to dull the boldest bullhorns in said nitwit cacophony. This sudden trend toward waving your face like a Southern belle at the overwhelming and brutish nature of Internet conversation seems dramatic. We're herding a few jackasses here, not splitting the atom.

Obviously news comments are an ongoing evolution, and it takes a little work to cultivate meaningful conversation. But offloading your Viagra spam and bile-soaked comment section to Facebook because you can't be bothered to hire moderators is a cop out and it's lazy. Pretending you're doing it because you value conversation adds insult to injury. What Popular Science, Reuters and Re/Code are really saying is that they don't care enough about their communities -- or those regulars who do stop by to have intelligent conversation -- to pay somebody to weed the garden.

from the collateral-damage dept

Oh, Microsoft. The company has now admitted that it ended up sending a bunch of DMCA takedown notices on non-infringing videos, all because someone had posted product keys in comments to those videos. To its credit, Microsoft has apologized and said that it has "taken steps to reinstate legitimate video content and are working towards a better solution to targeting stolen IP while respecting legitimate content." That's all well and good, but this seems like the kind of thing that they should have done long before issuing obviously bad takedowns. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a tool like the DMCA notice-and-takedown provision that makes it just so damn easy to censor content. Those issuing the takedowns do little to nothing to make sure the content being removed actually infringes. They just use either automated means or someone rushing through the process with little review, sending off takedowns willy nilly with no real concern about how they might kill off perfectly legal content. It still boggles the mind that a basic notice-and-notice regime couldn't suffice to handle situations like this. That and making sure that those issuing bogus DMCA notices receive some sort of real punishment to give them the incentive to stop sending bogus takedowns.

from the public-comment dept

When the first analysis came out of the early batch of public comments on net neutrality, we pointed out the rather noteworthy fact that there were very few independent anti-net neutrality comments. Following the second round, we're likely to see similar results, though there was some ballot-box stuffing (which we'll get to in a minute). Still, Vox recently published a piece entitled: Why the FCC will probably ignore the public on network neutrality. The crux of the argument is that the comment effort is not the equivalent of a democratic vote, and that's exactly right:

In the interviews I conducted for my dissertation, FCC commissioners and a handful of staffers (e.g., civil servants, as opposed to political appointees) explained that the rulemaking process does not function like a popular democracy. In other words, you can't expect that the comment you submit opposing a particular regulation will function like a vote. Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding. Changes require systematic, reliable evidence, not emotional expressions. And with the exception of Democrat Commissioners Copps and Adelstein, the people I spoke with at the FCC considered citizen input during the media ownership proceeding as emotional and superficial content.

One staffer explained why some comments in the record matter more than others, saying a lot of comments submitted by ordinary citizens are not "usually very deep or analytical or, you know, substantiated by evidence, documentary or otherwise. They're usually expressions of opinion." That means these kinds of comments are "not usually reviewed at a very high level, because they didn't need to be."

Or as another staffer said, "I find the whole rulemaking context almost hilarious in many instances, because you know you're reading something, and you know it's not true. And you're guessing, you know, the person is hallucinating." Ordinary comments were, in other words, prone to error and lacked truthfulness, in the eyes of many of the Commission's staff. They also represented one person's opinion or experience, whereas according to staff, comments submitted by legal or economic experts collated information in a more systematic way, and from a much broader population of consumers.

Indeed, this actually makes a lot of sense. The rulemaking process isn't supposed to be a democratic setup, nor could it work properly in that manner. And, yes, many of the comments being submitted are nonsensical and effectively useless. The staffers are exactly right to focus on the comments that are analytical and are supported by evidence and details (and an understanding of the law). And while some people get up in arms about this, let's just take the ballot-box stuffing by some anti-net neutrality folks to show how pointless thinking of this as a "vote" is.

Soon after the whole "Internet Slowdown Day" effort to get people to contact the FCC and Congress in favor of real net neutrality rules, a somewhat nutty extremist group called "American Commitment," run by a guy named Phil Kerpen, declared "victory," saying that despite all those sites (including ours) taking part in the effort, their own "Stop Internet Regulation" petition got more signatures. Except, their actual petition was nutty misleading alarmist bullshit, pretending to be about stopping "the full federal takeover... of the internet."

Of course the open internet rules have nothing to do with any sort of "federal takeover of the internet" at all. It's just about which rules certain parts of internet infrastructure will be regulated under to keep the internet free and open to competition (the kinds of things you'd think the supposedly "free market" American Commitment operation would appreciate.

Even more telling, the only way that American Commitment actually got about 800,000 "signatures" on its petition was to flat out lie and buy. Beyond the misleading rhetoric above, it appears that American Commitment bought a bunch of email lists of other conspiracy-minded folks and then peppered them with claims like the following about what the government was trying to do in passing net neutrality rules:

"Erase your internet freedoms, upend your right to privacy, censor the content you view on Internet, seize control of e-commerce, keep records of the sites you visit and when, track what you read and for how long and so much more!"

Except, um, no. Nothing in any of the rules would enable any of that even remotely. Indeed, as Jason Koebler at Vice notes in that link above, despite Kerpin's triumphant claims of "beating" the Internet Slowdown people, the press almost entirely ignored him (even the "right wing" press), because everyone knows his effort was a joke.

Kerpen's grassroots coalition of 808,363 petition signers came almost entirely through paid email advertisements sent out through popular conservative websites such as Town Hall, The Washington Times, Human Events, and Red State. Email blasts were sent to hundreds of thousands of people with subject lines that had nothing to do with net neutrality, such as "Only Days to Stop Obama's Takeover."

Kerpen played on the far right's fear of government and dislike of Obama to get hundreds of thousands of people to sign a series of petitions that have no information about the issue at hand and has no links to places to learn more about the issue. A Senatorial press office told me it hasn't received the petitions, which Kerpen said he had "hand delivered" before admitting that they could have been misplaced.

On top of that, Kerpen massively exaggerated his numbers, counting each "signature" as three "letters" since the petition was sent to every person's two Senators and then their House representative.

Koebler presents further evidence of what a joke the campaign was, noting that a report on the "most influential tweet" in favor of Kerpen's petition was this one, which got all of... one retweet.

Given all of that, it's quite likely that the FCC will treat those "signatures" with the amount of weight and respect they deserve: which is close to nothing at all. And, this isn't to single out one side in this debate. There are numerous comments that have been filed with the FCC (often in response to the John Oliver segment) which simply curse out Tom Wheeler. And those shouldn't be given much weight either.

However, all that said, this doesn't mean that more general comments aren't helpful. What this whole process has shown is that the American public does care about the internet, and wants it to be kept as open and free as possible for innovation to occur on the internet. The public's interest in the topic does matter in making it clear that this is an issue that people care about and that they won't be happy if anyone mucks that up. From that, the FCC should recognize that people are watching what they do and are concerned about the eventual outcomes, even if the vast majority of them may not understand the nuances behind things like Title II, Section 706, "commercially reasonable" and paid prioritization.

There are multiple issues at play here. Having 3.7 million comments filed with the FCC (the vast majority of them in favor of protecting openness on the internet) is an important statement about what the public really wants (an open internet). However, the FCC has a job to do in deciding (1) what the right solution is and (2) what's in its power and mandate to do (the problem with the past rule was it went outside of the FCC's powers under the statute). To actually get to that answer, the FCC is likely to rely mostly on its own experts, and use the very small number of comments that dug into the more detailed and nuanced analyses of the issues at play. And that's the way it should be.

None of this means the FCC will eventually come to the right solution -- in fact, there's a good chance it will mess things up, because the FCC is pretty good at that sort of thing. But it's wrong to argue that if that happens, it's because the FCC "ignored" everyone. The real situation is more complex.

from the fascinating dept

We've already mentioned how a number of comments have been submitted concerning Australian Attorney General George Brandis' Hollywood wishlist proposal for copyright reform in Australia. There are a number of interesting comments worth reading. I was pleasantly surprised to see the normally copyright-maximalist BSA come out against the proposal, saying that it will create a real risk of "over-enforcement, punishment of lawful conduct and blocking of lawful content including critically important free speech rights." Dr. Rebecca Giblin, who has studied these issues and other attempts to put in place similar filters (and how they've failed), has also put forth a very interesting comment.

The most bizarre comment, however, has to come from Village Roadshow. Village Roadshow is the Australian movie studio that the US State Department admitted was used as the token "Australian" movie studio in the MPAA's big lawsuit against iiNet. iiNet is the Australian ISP that the MPAA (with Village Roadshow appearing as "the local face") sued for not waving a magic wand and stopping piracy. iiNet won its case at basically every stage of the game, and that big legal win is really at the heart of these new regulatory proposals. Apparently, Village Roadshow's CEO still hasn't gotten over the loss in the legal case.

I read a lot of public comments to government requests. Comments from individuals may vary in style and quality, but generally speaking, comments from large businesses and professional organizations take on a certain very professional tone. You can see that in basically every comment listed in this particular comment period. Except for Village Roadshow's. The tone is both exceptionally informal and... almost frantic. The use of hyperbole is quite incredible. It claims without these reforms the entire industry will die, and says that infringement is on par with terrorism and pedophilia. Just the intro itself basically highlights the style and tone:

Piracy, if not addressed, will shut down the Australian feature film production industry
entirely. It will rip out the heart of the cinema and TV industries, creating massive
unemployment and slashing the profitability of taxpaying companies.

The problem is urgent. Village Roadshow estimates the theatrical business is down 12% as
a result of piracy. Rupert Murdoch interviewed in Australia said: “between 15 and 20 percent
of Fox’s revenue is being eaten up by illegal downloads”!

The problem is urgent as piracy is spreading like a highly infectious disease and as bad
habits become entrenched, they become harder to eradicate. Also of course high speed
broadband is just around the corner.

The dangers posed by piracy are so great, the goal should be total eradication or zero
tolerance. Just as there is no place on the internet for terrorism or paedophilia, there should
be no place for theft that will impact the livelihoods of the 900,000 people whose security is
protected by legitimate copyright.

And this is from the company whose CEO is refusing to take part in a public Q&A about the issue because he claims that any such event will be "filled with crazies."

The filing also quotes Steve Jobs from Walter Isaacson's book:

“From the earliest days at Apple, I realised that we thrived
when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole
our software we’d be out of business. If we weren’t protected
there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product
designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to
dissipate, creative companies will disappear or never get
started. But there’s a simpler reason. It’s wrong to steal. It
hurts other people. And it hurts your own character.”

Of course, there's that other famous Steve Jobs quote that is a bit more accurate:

"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

Village Roadshow's filing actually claims that Brandis' proposal does not go far enough in making ISPs liable and forcing them to magically make piracy disappear:

Vitally, in Village’s view, the question of “reasonable steps” presupposes the clear
establishment of ISP’s being potentially liable for infringement on their services. It is crucial
that this first step be properly legislated – and then ISP’s will approach the consultation
process with a legal incentive to co-operate. As the Discussion Paper states “Extending the
authorisation liability is essential ….”. Village is concerned that the proposed amendment to
Section 101 of the Copyright Act suggested in the Discussion Paper does not clearly achieve
this, and supports clear drafting to achieve that objective.

The underlines are in the original. Village Roadshow says that it would love to be able to bombard ISPs with notices in a graduated response (i.e., three strikes type) system, but that it will refuse to do so if it actually has to pay for each notice (apparently Village Roadshow not only wants ISPs to be the copyright cops, but it wants them to do so for free).

The entire comment filing comes off as ill-thought-out ranting, or last minute answers to a take home exam of a procrastinating junior high school student. Perhaps my favorite example of this is in response to the question "How can the impact of any measures to address online copyright infringement best be measured?" and Village Roadshow starts off its response:

from the a-mistake dept

Every so often this sort of thing pops up where people suddenly think it's a good idea to "end anonymity" online. We've discussed this in the past, and it's always the same basic argument -- one that conflates anonymity with "bad things" that people say online. There are all sorts of problems with this, but it starts with this: anonymity also allows people to reveal all sorts of good things online as well and plenty of people say and do horrible things with their names attached. And yet... the arguments keep on coming. Here, for example, is law professor Danielle Keats Citron in the NY Times arguing that the First Amendment shouldn't protect trolls online, and the way to deal with it is to "revoke the privilege of anonymity:

Intermediaries — usually the websites where trolls post comments — can step in to revoke the privilege of anonymity, or even remove abusive speech that violates their community guidelines but when trolling turns into cyberharassment or cyberstalking, the law can and should intervene.

Meanwhile, a Washington Post article by Kevin Wallsten and Melinda Tarsi talks up their "research" which (the headline suggests) says we should do away with anonymous comments entirely. The reasoning? Their study showed that people liked websites less when they had anonymous comments.

To shed light on whether anonymous comments actually matter for how people feel towards the media, we conducted a survey experiment in which Internet users were exposed to varying amounts of media criticism in an anonymous comments section attached to a hypothetical news story from USA Today. Specifically, our subjects were randomly assigned to a “media praise” condition (where comments used positive adjectives to describe the high quality of the outlet’s reporting), a “media criticism” condition (where comments used negative adjectives to address the low quality of the outlet’s reporting), a “mixed” condition (where half of the comments were drawn from the “media praise” condition and half were drawn from the “media criticism” treatment) or a “no comments” condition (where the comments section was left empty). We then asked our participants to rate the overall news media and USA Today on a “feeling thermometer.”

Consistent with the concerns of the “no anonymity” movement, we found strong evidence that anonymous posts shape the attitudes of news audiences. Specifically, we found that Internet users became significantly more negative towards the news media and USA Today when exposed to a story with an anonymous comments section. Somewhat surprisingly, we found that this pattern of negativity held even when the anonymous comments praised the media’s reporting. Below is a graph showing the average rating of USA Today and the news media in each experimental condition:

Of course, that focuses just on a comment section in which the focus is on cheering on or complaining about the reporting. What about all of the useful conversations and discussions that are enabled because of the anonymity? That gets totally ignored. As we've noted over and over again in our weekly highlighting of the most insightful and funniest comments -- as voted on by the community here -- it's quite common to see anonymous comments come out on top. And that's because many of our commenters -- both anonymous and not -- often join in on the conversation, rather than just drop two cents about whether they like or dislike the article itself (which the study above presumes).

Thankfully, at least some are pushing back on this silly idea of banning anonymity. Gabriella Coleman has a great NY Times piece about the important values of anonymity and even how it enables those marginalized by society or victims of crimes to speak out where they otherwise wouldn't be able to do so:

But we should also consider what we would lose were we to ban, or even discourage, the use of anonymity on the Internet. Debates about trolls routinely conflate anonymity with incivility but a broader look at online activities reveals that public good can come when users can hide their identity.

For example, medical patients and mothers discuss sensitive issues (be they clinical or related to parenting) in pseudonymous forums, allowing for candid discussions of what might otherwise be stigmatizing subjects. Anonymous activists rely on the web for whistle-blowing or to speak truth to power without fear of retribution. And, in a strange twist, victims of hate crimes use anonymity to speak out as well: anonymity can empower those who seek consolation and justice to speak out against assailants enabled by the same processes.

Anonymous expression has been a foundation of our political culture since its inception, underwriting monumental declarations like the Federalist Papers. At its best, it puts the attention on the message, rather than the messenger.

Yes, some people abuse anonymity, but many use it wisely. And yes, some people are obnoxious online. But confusing the two things and assuming that anonymity automatically leads to obnoxious behavior is just wrong. We wouldn't be the site we are today if we didn't make it easy for anyone to comment, anonymously or not. The contributions in our community from people who choose to remain anonymous are often insightful, witty and educational. Are there some people who abuse the privilege? Sure. But focusing on the few bad players and wiping out a powerful tool because of it seems incredibly short sighted.